Could you explain this a bit more or link to some info? Im new here too, I thought the whole point was that different instances communicated which communities where hosted through them so It wouldn’t matter what instance you have your account with and you will be able to see the different communities from different instances.
And to get some jargon right, that intercommunication between instances is the fediverse.
It does matter where your account is because instances will not federate communities until someone from that instance subscribes to that community, and then it only pulls 20 posts and no comments. It will then start pulling everything new thats being posted/commented on that community, but anything before that is basically gone. This means that if you join a new/low userbase instance you will be missing a lot of stuff that was posted, while the larger instances will have way more people subscribed to communities before you even joined therefore having a larger content pool
This is the current and unfortunate situation. I dearly hope that this will change soon, leveling the playing field for young instances, and improving discoverability.
Im not sure what kbins boost does or if theyre even the same as lemmy regarding this problem.
You could forcefully pull posts and comments into your instance by copying their original link and pasting it into your instances search, it will then federate to your instance after a few seconds but doing that for every post and comment would be stupid unless the admins cam somehow automate it
The point is your instance doesn’t automatically pull every community in existence, it pulls from communities someone on your instance has already ubscribed to. So yes, you can subscribe to any community*, but you may need to be the first to actually find said community and subscribe no one else has.
When I browse my all feed I see posts from every community that anyone has ever subscribed to on my instance. But if I find one I like elsewhere I can be the first to manually connect (copy paste link) then more people can discover it since I basically added it to their “all” feed too.
Less confusing than I made it sound, and as the user base grows most of the big interesting communities will have been found and federated on instances with decent userbases.
Could you explain this a bit more or link to some info? Im new here too, I thought the whole point was that different instances communicated which communities where hosted through them so It wouldn’t matter what instance you have your account with and you will be able to see the different communities from different instances. And to get some jargon right, that intercommunication between instances is the fediverse.
It does matter where your account is because instances will not federate communities until someone from that instance subscribes to that community, and then it only pulls 20 posts and no comments. It will then start pulling everything new thats being posted/commented on that community, but anything before that is basically gone. This means that if you join a new/low userbase instance you will be missing a lot of stuff that was posted, while the larger instances will have way more people subscribed to communities before you even joined therefore having a larger content pool
This is the current and unfortunate situation. I dearly hope that this will change soon, leveling the playing field for young instances, and improving discoverability.
I know you can “boost” on kbin which will refederate it out. I think? Does lemmy have something similar?
What if you link me a post from before my instance federated with the community?
Im not sure what kbins boost does or if theyre even the same as lemmy regarding this problem.
You could forcefully pull posts and comments into your instance by copying their original link and pasting it into your instances search, it will then federate to your instance after a few seconds but doing that for every post and comment would be stupid unless the admins cam somehow automate it
The point is your instance doesn’t automatically pull every community in existence, it pulls from communities someone on your instance has already ubscribed to. So yes, you can subscribe to any community*, but you may need to be the first to actually find said community and subscribe no one else has.
When I browse my all feed I see posts from every community that anyone has ever subscribed to on my instance. But if I find one I like elsewhere I can be the first to manually connect (copy paste link) then more people can discover it since I basically added it to their “all” feed too.
Less confusing than I made it sound, and as the user base grows most of the big interesting communities will have been found and federated on instances with decent userbases.
You got it right, sometimes there’s even communities with the same name on different instances.